SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 2025
Last thoughts about two books: In this particular line of endeavor, it's the rare day when you get to consider something uplifting and good.
As of this very morning, we've already been dragged back into the part of the world where TV viewers hear someone say, "How great was that?" when they see a young woman taken away by masked men on the streets nears Tufts:
When TV viewers are told that rendition of people to a Central American gulag, absent anything like due process, is actually a very good thing because we got a good price on their confinement from a Central American strongman.
(As we've reported, offering likes to the videotape, the same person made those statements, on two different occasions, on the Fox News Channel.)
As for ourselves, we've already re-entered the realm in which a federal judge might be said to have been mocked by Karoline Leavitt and Stephen Miller—but also by that same Central American strongman.
To see the strongman's mocking tweet, you can just click this. For more of what Leavitt and Miller said, you could peruse this BBC report.
(Inevitably, Miller called the judge a "Marxist.")
We've already been dragged back into that realm! We think of the way the Harrison Ford character decides to end an internal exile from the widespread disorder of the 1980s—agrees to end his exile inside the "secret annex" of Amish country—at the end of the Oscar-nominated 1985 film, Witness.
Yesterday, we were thrilled to be able to link to a recollection like this. For today, we thought we'd offer a bit more background about Francine Prose's 2009 book—a book which spills which awareness of the higher possibilities of the human experiment:
HarperCollins Publishers
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
By Francine Prose
“Prose’s book is a stunning achievement. . . . Now Anne Frank stands before us. . . a figure who will live not only in history but also in the literature she aspired to create.” Minneapolis Star Tribune
That's the book to which we refer. If only on this one last day, we thought we'd try to flesh out the various themes its author explores.
What themes does Prose explore in her book? Amazingly, HarperCollins allowed NPR to publish her entire opening chapter, fashioning it an "excerpt."
As you can see, that chapter begins with a statement about Anne Frank's book—a statement authored by John Berryman in a 1967 essay. Prose begins her book with this:
The Book, The Life, The Afterlife
"I would call the subject of Anne Frank's Diary even more mysterious and fundamental than St. Augustine's, and describe it as: the conversion of a child into a person. . . . Why—I asked myself with astonishment when I first encountered the Diary, or the extracts Commentary published—has this process not been described before? universal as it is, and universally interesting? And the answer came. It is not universal, for most people do not grow up, in any degree that will correspond to Anne Frank's growing up; and it is not universally interesting, for nobody cares to recall his own, or can. It took, I believe, a special pressure forcing the child-adult conversion, and exceptional self-awareness and exceptional candor and exceptional powers of expression, to bring that strange or normal change into view."
— JOHN BERRYMAN, "The Development of Anne Frank"
So begin the Francine Prose text. Prose then quotes a second statement, this time from Philip Roth:
"She was a marvelous young writer," the voice of Roth says at the start of a longer statement. "She's like some impassioned little sister of Kafka's, his lost little daughter."
So begins Prose's book, in which one principal theme is this:
Anne Frank wasn't just an adorable child, placing adorable jottings in the diary of a child. In Prose's view, Anne Frank was also something else. Early on, Prose posits this:
In his 1967 essay, "The Development of Anne Frank," John Berryman asked "whether Anne Frank has had any serious readers, for I find no indication in anything written about her that anyone has taken her with real seriousness." That is no longer completely true. In an incisive 1989 New Yorker essay, "Not Even a Nice Girl," Judith Thurman remarked on the skill with which Anne Frank constructed her narrative. A small number of critics and historians have called attention to Anne's precocious literary talent. In her introduction to the British edition of The Tales from the House Behind, a collection of Anne's fiction and her autobiographical compositions, the British author G. B. Stern wrote, "One thing is certain, that Anne was a writer in embryo." But is a "writer in embryo" the same as one who has emerged, at once newborn and mature?
The fact remains that Anne Frank has only rarely been given her due as a writer. With few exceptions, her diary has still never been taken seriously as literature, perhaps because it is a diary, or, more likely, because its author was a girl. Her book has been discussed as eyewitness testimony, as a war document, as a Holocaust narrative or not, as a book written during the time of war that is only tangentially about the war, and as a springboard for conversations about racism and intolerance. But it has hardly ever been viewed as a work of art.
"Anne Frank has only rarely been given her due as a writer"—as a person who happened to be gifted with "precocious literary talent," in a way most people aren't. That's one of the themes which Prose explores through her account of the way Anne Frank composed her journal, then rewrote more than a year's worth of passages.
Frank did so in the hope that her journal might be published as a book, in keeping with the stated desire of the Dutch government in exile that a full record of the Nazi occupation might be offered after liberation, which was already believed to be soon to come.
The sheer effort which went into Anne Frank's book is one subject of Prose's book. In this passage, Prose describes what she learned once she started on the project which produced her own book:
I had always believed Anne Frank's diary to be a printed version (lightly edited by her father) of the book with the checked cloth cover that she received on her thirteenth birthday in June 1942, and that she began to write in shortly before she and her family went into hiding. That was what I had assumed, especially after I, like the rest of Anne's early readers, had been reassured by the brief epilogue to early editions of her book, in which we were informed that "apart from a very few passages, which are of little interest to the reader, the original text has been printed."
[...]
In fact, as I soon learned, Anne had filled the famous checked diary by the end of 1942; the entries in the red, gray, and tan cloth-covered book span the period from June 12, 1942, until December 5 of that year. Then a year—that is, a year of original, unrevised diary entries—is missing. The diary resumes in an exercise book with a black cover, which the Dutch helpers brought her. Begun on December 22, 1943, this continuation of the diary runs until April 17, 1944. A third exercise book begins on April 17, 1944; the final entry was written three days before its writer's arrest on August 4.
Starting in the spring of 1944, Anne went back and rewrote her diary from the beginning. These revisions would cover 324 loose sheets of colored paper and fill in the one-year gap between the checked diary and the first black exercise book. She continued to update the diary even as she rewrote the earlier pages. Anne had wanted her book to be noticed, to be read, and she spent her last months of relative freedom desperately attempting to make sure that her wish might some day be granted.
So the author learned. In our view, this determined process of rewriting also resembles a "fairy tale"—a tale sent to us from antiquity, from the gods, a tale designed to offer instruction.
Below, we'll show you the passage, later in Prose's book, in which she employs the term, "fairy tale." But when we first read Prose's book, we were amazed by this part of the backstory. Anne Frank may well have been an adorable child, but she was also a determined writer, one who "wanted her book to be noticed, to be read."
On the day of her "arrest," her book was saved by the actions of Miep Geis, the woman who had risked her own life to keep the Franks safely in hiding for a bit more than two years.
(The righteous of the earth do exist! Geis and her husband were also hiding a university student in the attic of their home. He was never found, never arrested.)
In yesterday's report, we briefly described the details of the way Anne Frank's famous book was saved. It's when Prose describes that chain of events that she employs the term, "fairy tale:"
Eventually, it [had been] decided that the briefcase containing the diary would be one of the things the family took with them if a fire or some other emergency necessitated a hasty escape from the attic. But now the briefcase was being put to a different use. [The arresting officer] dumped out the papers, along with some notebooks, and handed the satchel to his colleagues to stuff with jewels and cash.
The detail of the briefcase could have come from one of those fairy tales that counsel reflection, patience, morality—lest one wind up like the thoughtless, greedy man or woman (usually the wife) who mistakes the rhinestones for diamonds or cooks the magic fish for dinner. Eventually, Silberhauer realized he'd filled the briefcase with pasteboard and scattered rubies across the attic floor.
But how could he have imagined that what he had discarded—loose sheets of paper, exercise books—was not only a work of literary genius...but a piece of evidence that would lead to the exposure of his role in the Nazis' war against the Jews, even as many like him slipped back into their old lives?
The arresting officer had dumped priceless rubies onto the floor so he could haul off a handful of trinkets. It's like a fairy tale, Prose correctly said—like instruction sent by the gods.
The original contents of the journal had been rewritten at lightning speed. Eventually, the very young person who rewrote her text died of typhus, at age 15, mere weeks before the camp in which she was imprisoned would be liberated—exposed to the world.
That said, every person wrongly taken away is, of course, the very same person seen in the beautiful, instructive photographs we linked you to yesterday morning. Accidents of literary precocity to the side, every person wrongly taken is, of course, that same person, the person with that human face.
We first learned about the bare outline of these events when we were ten years old. We're writing too much about them today, but it's obvious why these events have inspired a type of religious awe in countries around the world.
Prose does a superb job exploring her various themes. We ourselves will add this:
Every victim led away is the person described by Prose. Also, every human population contains its collection of unfortunate people who may be inclined to behave in roughly the way Silberhauer did.
"How great is that?" Fox News Channel viewers were asked when the young woman at Tufts was removed from the street by six men. Earlier, such viewers had also been told this as they watched Fox & Friends:
We got a wonderful price from the Central American strongman!
Thanks to our imperfect wiring, we're all inclined to fail in such ways until we may somehow learn not to. Yesterday, we were lucky enough to be able to link to some photographs which might help us understand what we're allowing to happen when we refuse to speak about the full extent of what is occurring around us.
Blue America has been insisting on the right to avoid such a task. We aren't as smart as we constantly say we are, nor are we morally perfect.
That doesn't mean that we're bad people. It simply means that we're people people—but also, that we may have a great deal of explaining to do, a bit of forgiveness to seek.
